


other worlds than these

by Molly



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Horror, M/M, S4 AU, Sam/Dean Minibang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-10
Updated: 2011-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-24 12:04:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molly/pseuds/Molly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is lost in a barren desert landscape, his past and his identity stripped from him in the transition between worlds. Guided by a deep internal pull toward a man he only sees in his dreams, Dean crosses the desert alone, on foot, until he finds a strange boy named Sam living in the ruins of an ancient city.</p><p><em>Written for the <a href="http://samdean_otp.livejournal.com">Sam/Dean minibang</a>, this is an AU version of Dean's ascent from Hell after S3.  It's also a kind of a fusion, or possibly just an homage, to Stephen King's</em> The Gunslinger. <em> I don't think it's necessary to have read the Gunslinger to follow the story. Please see the end notes for additional info, warnings, and thanks.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	other worlds than these

He wakes up walking, no name, no face -- just the dusty thud of his boots against the cracked earth and the glare of the noon sun baking down on it to tell him he's alive. A vague concept of _before_ skitters blindly at the back of his thoughts, ugly and slick with slow poison when he tries to latch onto it. He knows when to hold on and when to let go -- it's the first thing he knows about himself, and for a very long time, the only thing -- so he turns his mind away, turns his eyes ahead, and keeps walking.

This is a white land, bare as bone. Cluttered with tufts of a sparse brown grass and worn down by low, constant moans of wind, it stretches in an endless circle in every direction until it meets the empty sky. Years since the last rain, he thinks, if it ever has rained here. The grass, such as it is, lives on promises made in long-gone better days.

Thirst claws at the back of his throat, drags at his heels. He works up a drop of spit and rubs it over his dry, chapped lips. Something behind him sloshes quietly, and that's how he discovers he has water.

The bags slung across each shoulder are heavy, made of thick, well-oiled leather. They're small, but full, closed up with tight waxy stoppers. He sits down, folding his long legs under him, and takes a drink, swishing it around his gums, over his tongue. It tastes like ash and goes down like heaven, sweet enough to make him smile, even here. It lightens his mind to know there's more, so he saves it, corks the bag carefully and double checks the seal. He'll need all he has, and probably more.

Rest sets off a scatter of aches he didn't know he had. The small of his back, the bowed-out curve of his legs. The light is vicious, reflecting off the hardpan and lodging white spikes of pain behind his eyes. His skin feels sandblasted, the backs of his hands burned brown under new patches of red. He's been walking for longer than he knows, longer than he can know, and the urge to just lie down gnaws at the edge of his reason. The ground sucks at him, tries to draw him in. It would be death to sleep under this strange, hateful sun; but first, oh, first it would be sweet.

He rises to his feet -- which throb like red bags of raw meat in his boots -- and feels oddly fortified by the decision. He has water, and he has a direction; it's enough. He has a gun, too, holstered on a worn strap of leather around his hips, and a knife tucked into a sheath at the small of his back. These are things he knows, things he trusts and is willing to use. Talismans, maybe -- there's an odd tingle to the warm, smooth metal that speaks of unspeakable things. Gifts or burdens -- that he doesn't yet know. He expects he'll find out somewhere on the road ahead.

Most of the day passes one seamless hour to the next, his thoughts unchained from each other and drifting like the dust devils that twist and sprawl in the heated wind. As the sun drops toward the horizon, shadows rise and walk themselves back from every stray twig and pebble that raises itself above the flat, featureless land. He stops again to take a drink, not daring to sit down; he sways where he stands, his eyes closed to shut out the grit, and when he wipes stray drops of water from his cracked lips, the back of his hand comes away smeared with red.

The temperature falls fast when the blood-red sun drops out of sight. Stars come out, stars the likes of which he's sure he's never seen. They cluster thick and fat in the sky, pulsing with a rancid, ghoulish light he instinctively wants to hide from. The ground picks up their mottled glow and stretches like a putrefying skin across the earth. The skin between his shoulder blades itches and creeps, and he steps as lightly as he can, wishing for shelter he doesn't quite believe in.

A sharp knife of shadow falls across his invisible path, startling him out of a walking daze and drawing him to a sudden stop. Ahead, a squat silhouette mars the boundary of his vision. The wind howls around it, and a rhythmic _BANG! BANG BANG!_ startles his hand down to the carved grip of his gun. He drops to a crouch and hovers over the dirt, connected to the earth only at the balls of his feet, ready to chase or to run. But nothing cries out, nothing comes, and a pale flicker of memory slips up from the depths of his mind, connects itself to the sound.

A loose shutter on a lonely, empty house, windows open to the rotting sky, wooden door unlatched and half off its hinges. He's cautious, but a roof between him and those stars would be the difference between rest and nightmares. If someone's there, maybe they'll let him in. If they won't, he's got the gun and the knife; maybe he'll make them.

He's there, almost to the door, when someone calls out over the whine of the wind, "Stranger, stay back or get dead, makes no never mind to me."

He pauses, thoughts running swift and turbulent, bitter with the tang of fear. _Shoot or die_ a voice in his head tells him, a clear and bell-like voice that seems to speak a great deal of sense; then it says, _Cut him, bleed him, make him bleed_ and he eases his hand off the butt of his gun and tries not to think about the knife.

"I'm not here to hurt anybody," he says, and his voice is a pure horror, the rasp of razor blades over broken glass, desiccated as the land he's walked across.

"Nobody ever comes here for anything else." A shape comes out of the house, long hair blowing back from a pale, homely face. A woman, stick thin beneath a soiled white shirt, arms poking out of the sleeves like twigs. One of her arms stretches out longer than the other and resolves itself into the narrow black barrel of a sawed-off rifle. "Keep on walking," she says, "if you want to keep being able to."

"Do you live here?"

"Nobody _lives_ here," she says. "And it's none of your business anyway."

"Look, I don't want to fight. But I don't want to sleep out here with those things staring down at me, either. I have water, I can share. And I can pay for the space with work, if you'll let me."

A moment of chill silence passes. Then she says, "What's wrong with them, then?"

"They freak me right the fuck out, is what's wrong," he tells her. "Way more than you and your sawed-off do."

"Most people with any sense get indoors before they come out. Makes me wonder what kind of a man goes out for a stroll under 'em."

"I'm just lost," he says. "I'm not a fan."

He sees a flash of teeth, and she drops her gun arm, the strung-out tension in her body softening into something a little more human. "All right. You don't smell dead and you don't look mean; you might as well come inside."

~

There's no light in the shack, but there's warmth and shelter from the wind. He puts his back to the wall just inside the door and waits for her to tell him what to do. He can hear her moving around, make out a vague outline of her in the sickly light that streams in at the window and the door, and then even that is gone as the light cuts off.

A second later, a different light flares to life, yellow and warm. He catches his breath, startled to blinking by the change.

"They built stuff to last, before the world moved on," she says.

There are tarps over the windows, and a longer one over the door, tied to pegs in the walls with ancient, moldy twine. And overhead, and on the walls between the windows, glaze-glass sconces in stainless steel fixtures give off a bright, steady glow.

His eyes travel over the room, as dusty and disordered as he'd expected. There's a table with an odd slant to it, a couple of sagging chairs with the cushions rotted out of them; there's a cabinet flush against one wall, faded to match the sand-scattered floor. Over in one corner there's a tangled pile of blankets and a bag half-full of dried beans.

The woman is small, frail-looking, barely more than skin stretched tight over bone. Her eyes are dark, her hair wild and frizzed, tied back with a bit of the same string that holds the tarps in place. "Ain't exactly paradise," she says, "but it's a roof and it's light, so if that ain't enough, door's right over there."

"It's fine," he says; and for the locale, he means it. "Thank you for letting me in."

"Thank me in the morning," she says. "There might be beans, then."

"Would you like some water?"

"Got water. All the water I need. Couldn't live here if I didn't."

He raises his eyebrows, and looks around the room again. One room, one door, no water.

"Ain't telling you where it comes from," she says. "This was my place when you got here, and it'll still be mine when you're gone."

~

They settle in for the night, her in her nest of blankets, him with his hat across his chest, his back against the wall. The lights stay on -- easier to watch each other that way -- but she dims them with a tap of her fingers against the gleaming base of the one closest to the door. She curls into a ball and stuffs herself into the corner, wall-warded on two sides with her rifle in loose, careless hands taking care of the rest. He keeps his hand close to his holster, though he doesn't think she'll shoot him -- he can read people. At least he thinks he can; he guesses he'll know for sure come morning.

"What's your name?" he asks to break the thickening silence between them. It's not a true silence, not with the bang of the shutter and the pained screech of the wind, but that's the desert. Inside the four walls of this battered, left-over shelter, it's quiet as a grave.

"Brinna," she says.

"First or last?"

"Only. Only one I can remember, anyways."

"Well, it beats 'the scrawny chick with the shotgun'," he says, and stretches his mouth into a smile.

"You got one?"

His eyebrows pull together as he mulls that one over. He hasn't given it much thought. He reaches for it, but it's like stretching his hand into a dark, empty box -- makes him nervous, and he comes back with nothing for his troubles.

"Maybe not," he says finally, shrugging. "Can't seem to think of it right now."

Brinna snorts, and tucks the shotgun in a little closer to her body. "Lost it?" she says. "Or ain't found it yet?"

"What's the difference?"

"Some of the ones as lose it, go looking for it."

"And that's bad?"

She holds a hand up, curls her fingers into hooks. "Most of 'em think they'll find it behind their eyeballs."

"Right," he says. The empty box in his mind starts to itch, and he turns his thoughts away from it fast as he can. "That's bad."

~

After a while, he sleeps. It's not an easy rest, not with her gun pointed at him and her snores drowning out the wind. A bad dream could put a hole through his middle, and if she can't fix her own shutter, he doesn't think she'll make much of a doctor.

His own dreams, in the few minutes of sleep he snatches between jolts of panic, are fractured and indistinct. He sees a high wall, white and featureless, curved like a rib against the cracked earth. He sees a line stretching out like a band around the waist of the world. He sees a man, tall and straight, walking far ahead of him into the desert; the precise curve of his shoulder blades, the length of his stride, the determined smack of his feet against the ground -- these are familiar things, necessary things.

He wakes up frantic, an emptiness yawning in the pit of his stomach. He wakes up needing to _move_. He wakes up, and as he wakes, the dream wears itself thin against the grit of reality until all he has left is the ghost of a desperate want. The hours between waking and moving are empty and long.

When Brinna crawls out of her blankets, the sun is already high, and he's been awake for an hour, thinking and making plans. The heat rises with the sun, baking away the memory of the cooler night wind; he's sweating before he even stands up.

He doesn't kill her until he's ready to set out again, until his water pouches are filled up and beans as hard as peanuts rattle around in his stomach, giving him gas at both ends.

"Nothing personal," he says from behind the cocked hammer of his gun. "But I don't know you. I can't have you behind me."

He expects a little resistance, a little fight. But it's the gun she's staring at, the long black barrel carved with symbols he knows by heart and doesn't in the least understand. It feels good and right in his grip, a lethal extension of his arm, warm enough to be living flesh instead of steel.

" _Gunslinger_ ," she hisses through clenched, yellowed teeth.

It sounds almost right. Three lilting notes played very nearly on key. But there's a different word in his mouth that feels better.

He pulls the trigger, and watches her fall to the stone floor. Her limbs sprawl at strange, unhealthy angles, and the life bleeds out of her eyes while the red blood drips out of her skull. A faint flicker of light dances in the hole he's opened up in her, and the air smells electric and bitter, like the sky before a storm.

He looks at the gun in his hand. The carvings that run along its surface spark and shift in the sun, almost alive.

"Hunter," he says, trying it out.

He doesn't know what he's hunting, but he knows what he is.

~

Sam sleeps, a hot night's sleep that splits his mind down the middle. Half aware of the rasp of rough sheets twined sweat-damp around his legs, the well of humid heat his body makes in the thin mattress, and half trapped in a strange, mist-drenched dream.

He's in an empty forest, trees stretching to a limitless distance above, spreading wide as small houses where their roots sink into the earth. A carpet of moss, pungent and soft and glistening with dew, covers the ground and races up the straight, rough trunks in streaks of vivid green. Fog hangs in the air, filters anything ten feet beyond him into water color.

There's a wind in the still twilight woods, and the wind says, _Sam._

"Hello?" Sam calls out, taking a step toward the nearest tree and laying a hand lightly against the trunk. The bark scrapes at his palm, flakes away in specks against his fingers. It's too real, too detailed; moments pass in a steady, regular order just the way they should. But Dean shifts and lets out an unconscious snort in the bed next to Sam, the clock on the table between their beds gives off a low, annoying hum. Sam rolls over, tangling his sheets hopelessly between his knees, and walks slowly toward another tree, the moss a springy pad beneath his sneakers.

 _Sam_ the wind, the voice, tells him again. It's thin and narrow, like it's coming from a really long way away.

"Who are you?" Sam says to nothing. "Where are you?"

"Here," it says behind him.

He spins, catches his foot on a trailing root and falls to his knees. Before he lands, he's already starting to scramble back. There's a man, giant, blank-faced, naked -- his skin catches even the dim light that filters through the leaves high above and gleams with a pale, fierce fire.

"Who," Sam starts -- but the wrongness of that is immediately clear. "What are you? What do you want with me? I want to go back."

"You will," the man says.

"I want to go back _now,_ " Sam mutters for the sake of clarity. But he doesn't hold out much hope it will do any good. On the inside he tells himself, _wake up wake up wake UP!_ and tries to make some kind of sound, something to bring Dean to his bedside to shake him out of this, shake off the weirdness and realness and give him a hug and scratch at the back of his head. Dean's good at nightmares -- probably because he has so many. He always knows what to do.

"Your brother is lost," the man says. "He can't find his way."

Sam's eyes narrow, and he takes a step toward the strange man, in spite of his stern face and his creepy nakedness and his _glowing_. "You shut up about my brother."

"Hold on to your trust in him. You're going to need it."

"Let me go back." Sam scrubs at his eyes, resists the urge to stomp a foot, like he could shatter the dream by breaking through the bottom of it.

"Don't leave him. Don't forget." The man's mouth curves into a small, quiet smile. His eyes flare brilliant blue. A single shaft of light falls through the distant web of leaves above, falls on the man like a spotlight, and twin shadows rise against it, curved over his back, spread wide.

"You can reach him, Sam," he says, raising his eyes to the sky. " _Fear not_."

~

The day wears on. The hunter spends it searching the house for Brinna's source of water. There's nothing like a faucet inside, nothing on the outside walls. Nothing like a well anywhere nearby, not that he expects to find one. But he knows she was telling the truth; he can smell it, taste it on the dusty, bitter air. He moves the cabinet, pushes at the light fixtures, follows the humming sound of power laced through the bleached stone walls.

Under the mound of blankets in the corner he finds an iron loop set in an iron plate on the floor. Hinges turn whisper silent when he pulls the trap door open, and a set of shadowed steps leads down into the darkness under the floor.

At the bottom, the air is thick and still -- slightly cooler, but not by much. The daylight filtering in from the room above reaches far enough to gleam against a metal faucet that curves out of the stone wall over a shallow basin. The taps work -- hot and cold. All the water she needed, Brinna said, and she'd been here quite a while. He drinks as much water as he can hold, from his pouches and then straight from the tap, then refills the pouches and sets them aside.

When he's full enough to slosh, he strips down to nothing and scrubs warm water over as much of his skin as he can reach, ducks his head under the faucet and scrubs his hair, too. The water comes off him in white streams, desert dust ground so deep into his pores, it's like he's made of the stuff. He washes his clothes as best he can, wetting and draining and twisting them until the water comes out of them clear, and then takes it all back upstairs.

He lays his clothes out on the broke-down furniture to dry. It won't take long here, with the heat and the wind whipping around the room better than a Maytag. He raises his arms, lets the air whip him dry, then stretches up to his full height, fingertips brushing against the ceiling.

When he lowers his arms, he finds a tracery of scars slicing across his skin, overlapping lines and long-healed punctures, a twist of scar like a whirlpool and something on one arm that looks like it was made by long, sharp teeth. He looks further, finds silvered slices taken out of his sides, trails of stitches running like railway ties down both legs. His skin is like a road map of Hell, dried out and stretched tight over his bones. He's as thin as Brinna was, and it looks worse on a frame his size.

Besides the stars, it's the first thing he's seen in this place that frightens him. His clothes are still damp when he pulls them all back on.

~

He stays the night, back against the wall same as before. It would be strange to find this place standing alone with a day's empty walk in every direction, but he doesn't want to risk getting caught out at night again. He waits till morning, sleeping in unpleasant snatches punctuated by nightmares he can't remember when he opens his eyes. There's still a pull inside him, something that wants him to be somewhere else, but he ignores it until the red gleam of the sun breaks over the edge of the window sill, spilling angry dawn light across the floor.

And then he pulls his boots back on, settles his gun belt and his water bags and his hat, and walks until the late afternoon sun slants down on him at the edge of an ancient, dead city.

There's a wall that rises and rises, topping out at five or six times his height, and on the inside buildings of concrete and glass rise up to tower against the stark blue sky. On the eastern side of the city, stretching out like the fingers of a long, dark hand, there's shade. Thinking about tomorrow morning, he points his face and his feet west and follows the slow curve of the wall.

He hopes for a door, or a gate -- even a tumble of stone in a worn-down crack, if it's big enough to wedge himself through. The lifelessness of the city is unmistakable -- it's in the stillness, in the silence under the sigh of the wind. No eyes follow his progress as he walks, no one shouts a challenge though the buildings march right up to inside of the wall. He doesn't much like the idea of camping out in what amounts to a necropolis, but he likes even less the idea of camping under the stars.

The wall has no breaks. It's smooth, blank, clean, like it might have gone up yesterday. Time hasn't painted any history on it yet. But there's a sense of age to this place, a kind of permanence. It feels more real than the ground under his feet, more real than the air. More real than he is. It could have been here since the world was born, waiting for him, untouched by the wash of years.

For all he can remember about himself, so could he.

The sun is barely a memory on the horizon, the roil and pulse of the stars a grim threat in the fading twilight, when the wall makes a sharp turn into nothing. He looks up and up, up, and in the last burning of the red sunset he can make out the curve of an arch. His foot comes down on something that isn't cracked dirt, something smooth and hard -- a road, or the ghost of one, stretching west to the horizon and east into the shadowed depths of the city.

As the light fades, he steps into the archway, his boots scraping against smooth rock under his feet. It's darker here, and he moves quickly, eager to get inside of something, anything. He believes what his eyes and other senses tell him; he believes the tall, blank walls of this city have outlasted the very last citizen of whatever nation built it. But there's a spot between his shoulder blades that's harder to convince; he breathes quiet and shallow, walks soft, feeling more exposed inside the city's walls than out.

There's a long stretch of stone that runs cool under his fingertips, broken by windows that don't budge when he pushes on them. Eventually, because there always has to be one, he finds a door. And because he's desperate, maybe, or because the last one out forgot to lock up, it opens.

Immediately, he feels better. Not the city, then. Still just that crazy dread pouring down from twisted constellations. He shuts the door between himself and the night, presses his back against the wall beside it, and lets himself slide down till his ass hits the floor. He drops his head back and his hat slides forward, the brim slipping down over his eyes. He can't tell the difference -- dark is dark -- and after a minute to sort out his cramps from the creaks a day of walking has laid into his bones, he sleeps.

~

For a wake-up call, there's a boy, scrawny and full of bravado, his chin cranked up and his face pinched into a scowl that doesn't touch the fear in his eyes. His hair is scraggly and possibly brown; he's wearing jeans and an AC/DC t-shirt, and looks like he's been dipped in flour, head to toe. The hunter reaches for his gun, for his knife -- and when he comes up empty, he reaches for his water. That's still there.

"I wouldn't take a man's _water_ ," the boy says, contempt thick in his shaking voice.

"Not so polite about his weapons, though." Maybe it's not all bravado; the hunter may not know himself, but the kid picked him clean without waking him up, and he thinks that probably took some skills.

"You can have them back. I just didn't want you trying to kill me first thing, before we could talk."

"Fair enough." If the kid woke him up too sudden, he might have tried it. He sits forward and tips his hat back to get a better look at the situation.

The boy lets out a startled yelp and scrambles back, crab-like, until he fetches up against a counter on the far side of the room.

The hunter raises his eyebrows. "The hell?"

"Your eyes!" The boy gulps in a breath, and shakes his head. "They're black!"

His frown deepens. "Are not," he says calmly. He thinks Brinna would have mentioned it. But he looks around until he finds something useful, a pane of glass set into the marble wall, knobs and buttons running underneath it. The glass is useless, but the mirrored frame around it is polished to a high gleam. He rises to his feet, holding up his hands to show the boy he's got no plans for mayhem, and goes over to examine his reflection.

Odd that it's his eyes that freaked the kid out. His eyes are fine, somewhere between brown and green, blood-shot but otherwise normal. His face is a leather ruin, sunburned and wind-worn, traced over with the same silvered scars that scroll across the rest of his body. For his face, he feels like he owes the boy an apology.

"They don't look black to me," he says. He turns and opens them wide, so the boy can get a good look. "Actually, I think they may be my best feature."

"They weren't a minute ago," the boy says darkly. He stands up, though, and takes a step closer. "If you promise not to kill me, you can have your stuff back."

"You get a lot of strangers wanting to kill you?" the hunter asks curiously. "What, you got a bad attitude or something?"

"My dad says you can never be too careful."

"Well, he sounds pretty smart. But I'm not in the habit of killing little kids before breakfast, so why don't you hand my gear back and we can start this whole thing over."

"I'm twelve," the kid says, rolling his eyes; but he hands over the gun and the knife, keeping a respectful distance and backing up again fast when the transaction is complete.

The hunter slides the gun back into its holster, the knife back into its sheath, and feels clothed and armored again, just that easy. Superstitious crap; the day he can't take down some kid without iron to back him up is the day they'll bury him. But he made a promise, and whoever, whatever he is, that seems to matter.

He unslings one of his water pouches, uncorks it, and offers it to his new companion. The boy drinks deep before handing it back; when he wipes his mouth, after, it leaves the patch of skin around his lips comically clean.

The hunter shakes his head, feels a grin tug at the corner of his mouth. "What's your name?" he asks, because if he's not going to gank the kid, he's going to need something to call him.

"It's Sam," the boy says, finally smiling. "My name's Sam."

~

Sam has always lived in the City. There is water that springs from a fountain in front of the Library, which is filled with books in a language, maybe languages, he can't read and computer terminals that never shut down and never respond to his voice or his touch. There is a kitchen in the Library, behind the white white white counter and past all the white, white offices. In the kitchen there is a cold box (there is a word for it, but he can't remember it), and in the cold box there is always something fresh to eat. If he eats all the food on one day, more food is there the next. He doesn't know why, and after a while, he doesn't wonder.

He knows all the streets and all the buildings, though he doesn't know any of their names. The Library is on the Long Street, which is crossed by Dark Street, always shadowed by the tallest of all the tall buildings. Curved Street twists along the path of an empty waterway that has long since gone to dust, and High Street arches over the low buildings and winds between the high ones, supported by stone columns big enough to be buildings themselves. Sam hasn't ever walked on High Street, at least not past its first turning -- the wind is too strong, and too unpredictable. He doesn't want to be blown over the side.

In daylight he wanders wherever he wants. There are buildings that must have been shops once, buildings that were offices and banks, buildings that he doesn't know the use of. There are houses -- those are the most interesting, with their indecipherable traces of the families that once lived behind their walls. Sometimes there are pictures, and sometimes the people in them look like people he might meet on the street one day, out for another stroll, if they weren't long dead. But sometimes the pictures are not of people, not _his_ kind of people. Some of them have slitted eyes that glitter and follow him when he moves, and some of them have scales instead of hair, slits instead of a nose like he has. He doesn't like to go into those houses, though they mostly look exactly like the others.

Sam doesn't ever think of leaving, because he's waiting. He waits through weeks and months and years, singing scraps of remembered songs in the streets just to hear his own voice echo back; talking to himself in mirrored surfaces, so he doesn't forget how. He tells himself stories of the place he was before, and the people who lived there with him. After a while he makes up new stories; and after a longer while, he forgets them all. He still dreams them sometimes -- there's a tall man, and a car, and another boy, and a million houses, and a road that goes on forever. But when he wakes up, the dreams fade, and he's alone in the City.

When the stars come out, Sam finds shelter. He prefers to sleep in the Library, because that's where the water is, but if he's walked far, any building will do. He's never seen another living thing since he came here; he isn't afraid, but he doesn't like the look of the night sky. He washes himself clean sometimes in water from the fountain. He changes his clothes sometimes with clothes he finds in the houses, houses where boys his age or size used to live. He doesn't wear shoes; he did once, in the beginning, but the laces on them broke and the rubber soles wore through and his feet poked holes in the canvas. The streets are clean enough, not counting the desert dust. He doesn't need them.

At night, he sleeps on a long, low, cushioned bench with a high back, stolen blankets piled high over him. The Library is always the same temperature, and at night, that's too cold. He lies on his back as the lights dim, and reminds himself that he's waiting, that someone will come, that someone will lead him away. It's one of the last memories he has, and he tells it to himself every night before he sleeps, and every morning again when he wakes up. He's waiting, and someone will come. And he tells himself the very last memory, the one he holds onto tightest, the one he can never let slip away.

 _Sam, Sam, Sam,_ he tells himself, over and over and over. _Sam. My name is Sam._

~

"I think I'm supposed to go with you."

The hunter looks away from the fountain, its glittering drops flung high toward the skylight above, its cool moisture heavy in every breath he takes. He's amazed that the kid brought him here; it's a fortune in the wilderness, worth killing for. It's a stunning act of either trust or stupidity, and he doesn't think the boy is stupid. Maybe it's a test, to see what he'll do.

What he does: He tests the water, finds it fresh and pure, and then goes outside to empty his pouches into the street. He comes back to fill them again, and then drinks and drinks and drinks. He thinks he can feel each individual cell in his body expanding. The boy -- Sam -- drinks, too. He dunks his entire head under the water at the base of the fountain and scrubs the white dust from his skin and his hair. It swirls in a long smoky twist, then vanishes.

"That's not very sanitary."

Sam shrugs. "It drains off. The water just keeps coming."

"For how long?"

"As long as I've been here."

"And how long is that?"

Sam shrugs again, and looks away.

~

He takes Sam with him, when he goes. He probably shouldn't, but the walls of this city send a shiver of dread down his spine, make the hairs on his arms stand up. He can't stay, and somehow he can't leave the boy alone here. He thinks of the long, empty white spaces of time Sam must have spent, loneliness crawling into him and nesting like a living thing under his ribs, in the twisting coils of his brain. He thinks of the days and nights with the wind screaming through streets like canyons, scrubbing away the sharp edges of buildings and roads and memories. It's a city of forgetting, of expanding blank places, and it says something that Sam is still here, that he hasn't been swallowed up. Maybe the kid _is_ supposed to go with him. Maybe there will be some sane place to leave him, further on. It can't hurt anything, the hunter figures, so that's how it goes.

Sam knows the way to the far side of the city; it takes two days to cross it, to find the tall gate that arches over an empty, ancient highway and pass under it, back into the desert.

Outside the walls, the hunter stops, a hand on Sam's shoulder to keep him still, and looks back. In the morning light, the towers of glass and steel and rock shine like silver against the impossible blue of the sky. The seamless white stone wall stretches around the girth of the city in an endless circle.

Beside the arched gateway, there are scratches carved deep into the stone, letters two feet high, rough-hewn in straight lines, like words carved with a knife into the bark of a tree.

"'Enter Sandman,'" Sam says beside him, his brow pinched into a point between his eyes. "What does that mean?"

"Somebody's got a decent record collection," the hunter says. "And a weird-ass sense of humor."

~

For lack of a better direction, he leads them along the dead highway until the cracks become gaps, the slabs of concrete further and further apart. The unnamed, irresistible tug at his middle that led him to the city is useless here, vague, offering endless choices and preferring none. He only knows he has to keep moving, to keep searching. Sam follows him, mostly silent -- he has no memory of ever being outside the city's walls, and the landscape is as new to him as it is to the hunter. They both look, and watch, and wonder. They travel well together.

"How long have you been lost?" Sam asks at mid-day, when they stop to eat and drink and rest.

"Who says I'm lost?"

"Your feet say it. You're just wandering around, dude."

"I know where I'm going."

Sam snorts, and the hunter waits, but Sam doesn't have anything more to say on that subject. Instead he asks, "What's your name, anyway? It's not fair that you know mine and I don't know yours."

"You're just a big bundle of questions today."

"I don't think you know it."

"Well, what if I don't? You don't know anything _but_ your name."

"Hey, no need to get defensive. I'm just looking for something to call you. Don't feel bad, I bet lots of people forget their names when they're as old as you."

"As old as -- how old do you think I am, kid? Do I look like a senior citizen to you? I'm in my _prime_."

Sam ducks his head and grins.

~

As the day wears on, the wind picks up, a constant pressure at their backs. The hunter scans the horizon for anything that stands up out of the landscape, anything to put themselves under once night falls. He took this kid out of the city, away from roofs and rooms, away from doors to close against the dark, and there's no shelter for them anywhere now.

When the sun is almost gone, the hardpan still stretches out around them as far as the eye can see, a bloody orange in the fading light. The hunter uncorks one of the water bags and takes a long drink before passing it on to Sam.

"Stars will be out soon," he says.

"I know."

"Guess you're wishing you stayed in the city right about now."

"No."

"We can stay here, wait it out," the hunter says. "Or we can keep walking. How do you feel?"

"I can walk. And it's not your fault. I wanted to come."

"You didn't know any better."

"Shut up," Sam says, turning on him. There's a fierce light in his eyes, tangled up with the last of the sun. "You shut up. I'm old enough to know. I'm supposed to be with you. I'd rather be with you. It's death back there, even if it doesn't kill you. And we're supposed to stay together."

The hunter lays a hand on Sam's shoulder. "You seem pretty sure about that, kid."

"You can feel it, too. I know you can. You wanted me to come."

The hell of it is, Sam's right. Even now, night rolling in across the bare desert floor, he's right.

"You decided what to call me yet?" he says.

"Moron," Sam says, rolling his eyes. "Stupid. Douchebag."

The hunter shakes his head, laughs. "If you forget everything else," he says, "remember I'm armed, okay?"

~

They keep walking. The wind cools, turns to a loose flutter against their necks. The stars filter through the black sky, faint, and then roil into violent, virulent life. He can feel the diseased light where it touches his skin, and so can Sam; he presses closer, stuck to the hunter's side like a burr.

"It's just light," Sam says, his voice high and cracking.

 _It's more than that,_ the hunter doesn't say. "Don't talk," he says instead, meaning, _don't get any in your mouth._ Sam falls silent, obedient for once. He takes two steps for the hunter's every one, and says nothing.

An hour passes, and another. And then Sam tugs at his sleeve, frantic, turns his eyes up -- they're wide and excited. He points, and the hunter sees it, distant, indistinct: a patch of emptiness against the pale desert, a long straight track untouched by starlight.

He nods, and starts off toward it, Sam in tow. At first they walk; then, when the distance seems too great, they start to run. The hunter pulls Sam along, half-stumbling, half in the air as they move; and when even that is too slow, he swings Sam up onto his back.

"Faster," Sam hisses into his hair, " _Faster,_ " and he tries, hand held over his mouth like a shield, gasping in great, painful breaths with every stride. They close in, a hundred feet away, fifty, twenty.

They almost make it.

Ten feet from the line of darkness, something snatches at Sam, rips him from the hunter's back. The smell of it is a confused agony, thick and wrong, like gasoline and shit and rot all mixed together. Sam screams, a high, terrified wail that shatters the night around them. The hunter spins, makes a grab, but he's too late; something has the boy, something huge and muscled, fleet, its feet slapping against the dirt, too fast. Sam is tucked under its arm, fighting, screaming again, and again.

He'll never catch up. And he's ten steps from relief, ten steps and he's out of the light. He watches the boy, listens to the fading shouts under the wind.

 _Sam,_ his mind whispers to him, while he thinks about turning away. "Sam?"

From out of the dark, Sam's voice rings out in a final, broken cry.

~

The hunter can't catch up. But he has an eye like a scope, a hand as steady as rock. And he has the Colt, which has powers of its own, though he can't quite remember what they are. Sam and the thing that's got him make a single black target against the sky, but that doesn't matter. One way or another, it won't have him.

He spreads his legs into a steady stance, takes aim, and pulls the trigger.

Sam shouts again, and the black figure crashes to the ground.

"Sam?"

Silence. And then the pelting of feet, small human feet. The runner resolves into Sam just as Sam crashes into him, his shoulders shaking with quiet sobs, his arms wrapped like iron bands around his middle. The hunter clutches at the boy, relief quaking through him, and something shifts inside him, something deep and steady and glad.

"You're okay, kid," he says, leaning down to press his face against Sam's hair. "I got you. You're okay."

"I knew you'd get him," Sam says, his voice cracking on every word. "I knew you would. I knew it."

"Cuz I'm a freakin' badass, that's why," the hunter says.

The kid nods and looks up at him, tears running muddy tracks down his cheeks. "I know you," he says, certain as the earth.

The hunter cups Sam's chin in his hand, swipes his thumb across the wet spill under his eyes. The trust in those eyes is undeniable, and undeserved; he hasn't earned it. "You're in shock," he says uneasily. "Getting snatched by monsters just takes some people that way."

"No." Sam grabs at the hunter's hand and holds onto it like he thinks he's won a prize. "I mean, I _know_ you, okay? Your name is Dean."

~

Dean -- it's as good a name as any -- pulls them into the straight line of darkness, and it's like a shutter has been drawn across a window. The stars aren't visible here, in this wide stretch of blackness; nothing is. He can feel Sam beside him, hear the steady rush of his breath, but he can barely make out the edges of his shape. It's too dark to risk walking with the ground invisible beneath them, so they sit inside the edge of the line and wait.

When the sun rises, Dean looks out across the desert and sees a blunted shape crumpled against the dirt. "We should check it out."

Sam shakes his head. "I don't want to."

"What if there are more?"

Sam looks at him, eyes wide and amazed. "Then I really, really don't want to. Dude, let's just go, okay?"

"Go where, Sam? There's nowhere out here _to_ go. And if there are more of them, I want to know what they look like, in case they try sneaking up on us again."

Sam folds his arms. "You go, then. I saw way more than I wanted to the first time."

"Fine."

"Fine!"

Dean huffs out an annoyed breath, and pulls the knife out of its sheath at his back. He hands it to Sam, hilt first. He leans down to look him right in the eye. "You see anything that isn't me, anything at all, I want you to slam the pointy end of this into the middle of it and yell your head off, okay?"

"I can see it from here, Dean. I'll be fine."

"You just do what I tell you."

"Jerk," Sam mutters, and Dean gives him a quick smack on the side of the head, which he ducks with only moderate success. "Just hurry up."

~

It's got the overall shape of a man drawn wildly out of scale, and the face of a rat. Not a healthy rat, either; something sick, something born seriously wrong. It's got teeth the size of piano keys, sharpened to yellow points and coated with something slick and dripping. It's wearing a bright yellow overcoat and nothing else, and it's covered with thick, matted brown fur. If anything, the smell is worse now. Dean crouches next to it, trying not to barf up his stomach lining, and thinks.

It has hands. Five fingers, one of them opposable. It's eyes are open, covered in a pearly white film from the blowing dust.

"Well, that's horrible," he says to himself, and stands up, glad he left the kid behind. Whatever parts of that Sam hasn't seen, he probably doesn't need to know about.

When he reaches the place where he left Sam, he takes back the knife and says, "Let's go."

"Go where?" Sam mocks.

"Where do you think, smart-ass?" He waves down the line they're standing on. "This will keep us out of the starlight. And it has to go somewhere, right?"

Sam looks down the line for a long time. "I feel better here," he says finally, and that's endorsement enough for Dean.

~

The line is straight and wide. It's invisible, and at the same time, it feels more real than the world it's passing through. It's Sam who notices the edges of it, kneeling in the dirt to point out the way the dirt seems to warp beneath it, rippling into chevrons that point the way straight down the length of it to the horizon. The wind turns itself to follow it -- headlong or side-on beyond the boundaries of the track, but always at their backs when they walk inside it.

Nothing else comes for them. For Sam, Dean thinks; but he doesn't say it. Sam was the one the rat-man grabbed, when it could have had them both. Maybe it sensed Dean was armed, or hell, maybe the thing was just peckish instead of really hungry. But it went for Sam, out there in that livid twilight. In here, in the pitch black darkness or the searing day, Sam is safe.

That's worth something. Dean doesn't know when it happened, and he doesn't know why it should be that way. But it is.

"What do you think it is?" Sam asks, staring down the length of the track

"A road. Some kind of fault line, maybe." Dean shrugs. "Something powerful. Why, what do you think?"

Sam's eyes are distant, unfocused; his head tilts, like he's listening to something else, a long way off. For a moment, Dean wonders if the kid even heard him. But Sam looks at Dean, finally, and blinks, like he's surprised to see him.

"Sam?"

"I think it's a way out."

"Out of the desert?"

Sam shakes his head. He takes hold of Dean's hand and edges close to him, looking small and fragile and lost under his own skin. "I think... just out," he says.

"That's got to be good, though, right?" Dean looks down the track like Sam did. It's just more white rock and white dirt, hardscrabble stretching out till it hits the sky. "Anything's better than this."

"You'll keep me with you," Sam says, "right? I'm not supposed to leave you. We're supposed to stay together."

Dean's eyes narrow. "You got some reason to think we won't?"

"I can keep up. I won't let anything else get me."

"Sam, you didn't _let_ it get you that time. You just looked a little easier to chew than me, that's all."

"I'm just saying, if something else comes. I can fight back. I know how."

"I'm not leaving you," Dean says. He squeezes Sam's fingers, cuts off the flow of desperation. "I promise, all right?"

"You promise." Sam nods. He looks down the track again, a wary kind of longing in his eyes. "You won't leave me."

"Long as you don't snore and don't steal anything, I can't see why I would."

~

Nothing comes for them. But there's something out there; Dean knows it, and by the time the sun touches the far horizon, Sam knows it, too. Dean feels it in the twitch of skin between his shoulder blades, the whiff of something foul and feral on the wind. Sam feels it in his head.

"It's like an itch," he says, "right here," and points to the base of his skull. Some kind of instinct, maybe. But Dean thinks maybe it could be something more.

"Tell me if it gets worse," he says.

"You don't feel it?"

"Not like that." Dean looks behind them, into the haze of oncoming dark. "My senses tell me. Smell, mostly. I've been doing this a long time."

"How would you know?"

Dean raises his eyebrows. "I guess I don't."

"But you have. You kill things, bad things. Like that rat thing back there, and whatever this is. You'll kill it."

It's a kind description of what Dean does. What he's done. Brinna wasn't a bad thing, and she's rotting in the dust of Dean's first life here, the one before Sam. The heaviness inside him, the empty dark in his mind, makes Dean think he's probably done far worse.

"Where do you get that?" Dean asks, thumping Sam on the forehead. He's thinking less of Sam's psychic skills, or at least a little less of his judgment. "Bout right there?"

"No, here," Sam says, grinning, then winds back and slugs Dean with a bony, forceful fist right in the gut.

~

It stays with them. Through the long dark night, hovering just beyond the edge of the track, just far enough behind to tease at the far boundaries of their senses. Sam sleeps badly, tossing and turning over the hard-packed dirt. Dean stays awake, and waits.

The wind only blows in one direction here, bent by the invisible line that defines safety from the sickly starlight. Safety from the things that live in it. Sometimes it's ragged, scouring, driving sand and dust into their clothes and hair and eyes. Sometimes it's easy, cool and soft against sun-seared skin.

Sometimes, it carries voices.

Mid-way through the night, Dean rises to his feet and checks his gun. He leaves the knife for Sam, and the meager scraps of food they have left, and all the water. He turns to look, and it's a mistake. Sam's eyes are open.

"I'm just going to take a look," Dean says, crouching down beside the boy. "We need to know what's back there."

"I'll go with you," Sam says. But he doesn't move, and Dean can see in his eyes that he knows better.

"I'll be back by morning. Probably sooner than that. I can't have something I don't know about behind me, Sam. You get that, right? We need to know what we're up against."

"If you're coming back so soon, why are you leaving me the water?"

Dean shifts uncomfortably. His knees pop faintly when he stands up. "I'll be moving fast. Don't want to be weighed down."

"I can move fast." Sam sits up, wraps his narrow arms around his knees. "Faster than you, even."

"I know you can. But you won't. You're going to wait here for me, keep an eye on the food and the water, and keep yourself safe. Don't wander off the track, you hear me?" Dean waits until Sam nods, then nods back. "Nothing's going to happen to me. I'll be careful. But Sam, on the off-chance..."

"Don't say it," Sam snaps out. "Don't say anything." He turns his head away, takes the shine of his eyes away, closes down. "Just go on, if you're going."

Exasperated, Dean grabs at Sam's shoulder and gives it a shake. "I'm coming back. Don't you trust me at all?"

"You said you wouldn't leave," Sam says sullenly. "So, no."

~

It bugs him, but not enough to keep him from doing what needs doing. Dean sets out, the angry line of Sam's back set deep in his mind. Just a kid, he reminds himself, he doesn't understand how to be careful, doesn't understand there are things they have to do to stay safe. He'll see it's okay later, when Dean comes back.

The wind strengthens as he walks into it, a steady moan of pressure in his ears. The night is black as sin, but it's cool and sweet against his skin. The sense of something tracking them, tracking _him_ , gets stronger the further he goes on. He walks until the sensation of watching is as physical as a touch, and then he turns, and steps across the boundary of the track.

The alien starlight bursts across the field of his vision, nauseating after days of no exposure. It hits him in the gut, a sickening wrench, and he goes to his knees, puking up bile and phlegm until his stomach muscles twist and cramp inside him. He swallows back heaves, fighting to hold himself together, to see.

 _Hunter,_ the voice in the wind calls. _Hunter, come to me. Come to me and listen, I have truth here, I have knowledge, I have stories from the dark box, come..._

Dean shakes his head, and stumbles to his feet. The world seems to shift underneath him, like the deck of a rocking ship. He tries not to hear, but the voice slides into him, through him; winds itself around him with every breath and pins him, pulls him, deeper into the plagued, feverish light.

 _I hear your dreams,_ the wind tells him, _I hear your fears, I hear things_

"I won't come to you!" Dean shouts at the sky. "I promised!"

 _I know the boy_

Dean takes a step back, toward the safe dark track behind him.

 _I can tell you, I can see you, I can tell you about the dream and the man and the boy, about the road and the door at the end of it, I can tell_

A touch falls onto him, light and gentle, a caress of wind with only a hint of sand beneath it. It slides down his cheek; down his throat; down his chest, curling deep under his clothes. _I know things, _the wind tells him, _I can show you...___

Dean moans, shocked by a spike of want. The wind spins itself around him, teasing, begging. Invisible hands strip him down, and he lets them, he lets them, the light pours over his bare skin in a sick tide and it burns and burns. He closes his eyes, tries to close his mouth and chokes, gasping, and it still pours in and in.

"What are you," he whispers, words snatched out of him by a gust that burns his lips, then cools them. "What--"

 _Questions and answers,_ it tells him. _Ask. Ask me. Ask me._

"What am I?"

 _Lost. Hunter. Empty. Lost. Killer. KillerKillerKiller_

Dean falls to his knees, curls around the stab of need in his mind. Fingers he can't see, mouths he can't see, pull and drag at him, desire and disgust rising in him in a sickening flood. "How," he gasps, "what--I don't--"

 _ASK ASK ASK_

Questions, so many, questions he didn't know he had, questions he's never asked himself or anyone, idle and dark, sick curiosities, demands, it plucks them out of him, one by one, each a rip of pain in his heart, in his head, each a sick thrust into his body, into the grip of the ravaging wind. His body convulses, empties, seizes again, spilling on the dry, hungry earth, and still the whisper pulls at him, unspools questions from his mind and eats them, eats him, dizzying dark pleasure and hunger and pleasure again, until he can't bear it, can't escape it, doesn't have anything left to hold onto or to give except,

"Sam," he whispers into the dust, into the wind, incoherent and empty and burned, soiled by its unclean touch and the putrid light. "Sam..."

 _You cannot have them,_ the wind tells him, and oh, he knew, he always knew that, always. A murmur of sorrow glides across his skin, cool as water, a small peace inside the raging gale. _You cannot have them both. The boy, the boy in the desert, the boy in the beam, or the man in the dream, the man in the world away, you cannot have them_

"I need them," Dean says, "I need him, I need --"

 _Ask,_ the wind commands, and the storm takes him down and down and down.

~

He's drowning in air when the wind is ripped away, screeching. There's a word in it, in that vanishing wail. A final, brutal answer. It peels off him, ripping off strips of red, raw flesh; it leaves pieces of itself sunk into him, tendrils fluttering from his skin like strange white hairs, each burning like a long, poisoned stinger. He shouts, hoarse and choked, over and over until his voice dies in his chest and he can only gasp, frantic for air, frantic with pain.

"Stop it!" Sam orders, slapping him hard across the face. "Stop it! Dean, stop it, just stop, you're okay." He shakes Dean by the arm, and holds up the knife Dean left him, dripping with something white and viscous, a long, pale ooze. "I killed it. You're safe. I saved you."

Dean nods, closes his mouth. Tries to breathe the way people are meant to breathe. It feels like his lungs will never be full enough, like they don't open all the way down anymore. When he looks up, the sky is filled with mad stars and screaming sand.

"Track," he wheezes at Sam. He tries to drag himself back toward it, but the pain in his chest is unfathomable; he falls back to the dirt. He's naked, his clothes scattered by the wind, his scars laid bare under the sky. He never wanted Sam to have to see.

Beside him, not far off, a collapsed frame of pale bone lies in a broken heap. A tattered skin stretches across it, mottled and torn, drifting in the low breeze like ragged streamers. The skin is the same stuff that's stuck into him. His stomach heaves.

"Sam," he says, "give me the knife."

Sam hesitates.

"Sam?"

"Wait. Let me clean it." He takes a skin from where it's slung over his shoulder and takes off his shirt, gets it wet with precious water. Dean doesn't stop him. Sam wipes the blade as clean as he can get it, then hands it over.

"Don't watch."

Sam turns his head away.

The point of the knife is sharp as a needle, and it sinks into its flesh like it's finally found its way home. He digs as deep as he dares, hissing with more kinds of pain than his mind can process, and digs out one of the tendrils sunk into him. The hole the knife leaves behind flares with jagged orange light.

"Dean!"

Dean clenches his teeth. "I told you not to look."

"What _is_ it?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know."

"The... that thing. That's what it looked like, when I stabbed it. Like it caught lightning somehow."

It's what Brinna looked like when he shot her, too. Dean doesn't like the implications. He flicks the tendril off the tip of the knife onto the dirt, and goes for the next one. The same white goo Sam cleaned off it to start with is back, mixed pink from his own blood.

"Wait."

Dean looks up to find Sam looking off behind them. "Sam?"

"I got an idea." Sam stands up, gets behind Dean and gets his hands under his armpits, pulls. Dean barely moves. "Come on, you have to help me. I don't think this will work under the stars."

Dean helps; one agonizing, jarring pull at a time, he helps Sam drag him back toward the dark track across the desert. Time stretches out like taffy, a few yards taking a lifetime to cross. Sam's panting with exertion before they make the last foot of it and heave Dean across, out of the ichor of the light and into cool darkness that washes across his wounds like fresh water. Sam vanishes one more time before Dean can stop him; he's gone for less than a minute, but he comes back with Dean's clothes, his boots, his gun.

Too dark to see, but Sam is right, Dean can feel it. The white tendrils burn as they wither out of him; they give off a faint, sweet smell as he brushes them away. Better than opening himself up and letting more of that starlight into him. Better than the knife and its bitter stories about what Dean might be underneath his skin.

Along the far horizon, a faint red line of true light shows, the first glimmer of dawn. They've lost half a day, maybe more.

Dean takes a deep breath, pulls himself upright. Every bone, every muscle, cries out against it. He dresses as the light climbs, covering his old scars and his new ones. No bandages here, no ointments, but he thinks he'll heal. The outside of him will, anyway.

"You don't listen real well," he notes as he takes his gun back from Sam and settles it into its holster. He takes one of the water bags and leaves the other for Sam to carry. Then he hands Sam the knife.

Sam takes it, staring at Dean, then staring at the blade. It's filthy with the blood of monsters. The thing on the other side of the track, and Dean. He spares more water to wash it clean. It doesn't help his shirt any, but he puts it back on and tucks the knife into the small pack of food they have left.

"What was that thing?" Sam asks. He's carefully not looking at it now, at what the dawn might reveal. Dean looks, and he sees it hissing and smoking as the sun touches it, drifting from solid to smoke before his eyes. By the time he looks back at Sam, the thing is mostly gone.

"Demon," Dean says. "Maybe. I don't know."

"You were fucking it."

Dean flinches, but doesn't look away. "I guess I was."

"Why?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know, Sam. Don't think I really had much say on it."

Sam holds Dean's gaze for another long moment, then sighs. "Gross," he tells Dean, rolling his eyes.

Dean's startled by a bark of a laugh rumbling up from his chest. He claps Sam on the shoulder and gives him a shove to start him walking. "No more backtalk," he says.

~

In the afternoon, they stop to rest beside a stunted scrub tree, bare of leaves or shade like everything else. Dean turns his back to Sam to open his shirt, check the wounds the thing in the night left behind. The holes bored into him are sealed over with black scabs; when he presses down, the sores twinge a little, nothing like before. He buttons back up and turns around in time to see Sam tugging his sleeve down over his shoulder, looking scared and sneaky.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," Sam says, lifting his chin. "You want water, or what?"

"Sam."

"It's nothing. I fell on it when I pulled that thing off you. Just a bruise."

He holds out the water skin, and Dean takes it, never taking his eyes off Sam. "That's all?"

"That's all."

After a second, Dean nods. "If it still hurts tomorrow, I'm having a look at it."

"Whatever," Sam says. "You need more looking after than me."

~

A welcome sight, in the middle of the next day: the horizon is fuzzed over, indistinct. Clouds, possibly, which might mean water beneath them, maybe even rain. Some kind of life out here, besides Sam and Dean and the things that want to eat them. Sam sees it first, young eyes sharp and eager, and he starts walking faster, sometimes running out ahead. Dean lets him go, keeps a steady pace, and calls him back when he wants to go too far.

Roped back in from a long run out front, Sam comes back panting, hunched over with his hands on his knees as he catches his breath. "Grass," he reports between gasps, "all over, patches of it, and I think," he says, "I think far off, maybe some trees."

"Breathe," Dean says, and unstops the last water skin. He passes it to Sam, lets him drink far less than he needs before grabbing it back. "Anything else?"

Sam shakes his head, and turns like he might head back out again. Dean grabs his shoulder and holds him still. "No more running," he says, brushing a hand over Sam's dirty, sunburned face. It's hot -- hotter than the sun can account for. He stares Sam down, and reaches for his other shoulder.

Sam flinches back with a hiss. "Sam, I told you."

"It's really nothing."

"We're past you telling me. Now I need to see." He keeps Sam still with one hand and rolls the sleeve off his shoulder with the other. Underneath, the skin is an angry, puffy red, shot through with dark jagged lines of infection. His eyes flick up to Sam's. "Damn it, kid."

"I thought it would get better." Sam shrugs a little, looking at it with distant curiosity. "Yours did."

"Why didn't you show it to me right off?"

"I guess... I don't know. I thought it would just burn off in the track, like yours did. It was just the one, and you had so many... and you were fine."

"This is nothing like fine. How bad does it hurt?"

Sam's chin comes up. "It's not slowing me down."

"Christ." Dean shakes his head and looks away. "Not what I asked." He sinks his thumb into the edge of the redness, and Sam hitches in a shocked, pained breath.

"Don't leave me," Sam blurts out. He grabs onto Dean's wrist, his hands like little bent talons. Bright tears stand out in his eyes, but to his credit, he doesn't let them fall. "I'm okay. I can keep going."

"For the love of -- I'm not _leaving_ you, you moron!" Dean wants to shake him, but that would hurt him too much; he settles for slugging Sam in his good arm, and looping an arm around his thin neck. "We're sticking together. I'm not leaving you by yourself out here, not for the fastest car on the roads, not even if it was filled with beer and cheeseburgers, okay? Not for anything. Am I getting through here?"

Sam wipes his arm across his eyes, leaving a muddy smudge behind. He nods, drags up a watery smile.

"Okay. Good." Dean nods back, and presses Sam's face into his side. He holds on for a minute, just to comfort the kid and make his point. He tries to ignore the way the tightness in his own chest eases. "We're going to have to do something with that arm."

"I know." Sam nods, and pushes away, and goes to his pack to get the knife.

Lightning skips along the blade when Dean cuts it out. It feels right, somehow. Like they're the same, underneath the skin.

~

With that thing out of it, Sam's arm seems better. It's still warm to the touch, but the red lines out of the sore seem shorter, paler than before. Dean keeps an eye on it as the day wears on, and asks about it so much the kid stops answering and starts glaring at him instead. Wrapped up in a walking tangle of concern and annoyance, they almost miss the change in the desert floor, in the air around them.

Sam stumbles over a patch of grass; Dean catches him, then looks around and catches his breath. The sun hovers just above the horizon, painting the land in broad gold strokes.

The grass is everywhere, sharp blades burning in the slanted light. Patches here and there, but up ahead, the patches swell and run together, forming a vast, rising carpet. It's white here with them; and then further ahead a burnished brown. Even further--

"It's _green_ ," Sam says in a hushed whisper, like it's a mirage he can chase away if he says it too loud. "Dean, look!"

"I see it." That's all he can manage around the hope lodged in his throat like a stone. He'd thought, somewhere down below thinking, that the desert would just go on and on forever.

"How far?"

"Another hour." Dean shades his eyes with his hand and squints into the glare of the horizon. "Maybe a little more."

"We'll sleep on grass tonight," Sam says, his voice low and soft with wonder. "Do you think we'll find water?"

The dregs of moisture still rattling in the skins they carry are barely enough to keep them moving, and it's muddy, with a strong taste Dean doesn't like to think about. They need to find fresh water, and soon.

"Hope so," Dean tells Sam, ruffling his hair. "You stink like monster breath, kid."

~

The vegetation inside their track finds its green before the rest. Sam's eyes pick up the color and glow with it in the last of the light. It's a strange, changeling look, with his dust-white hair and his dust-white face. It makes Dean nervous, even as the signs of life in the world make him glad.

That night, as Sam predicted, they bed down on soft, springy grass, the skins with the last of their water lying limp and flat between them. The breeze that winds its way toward them from the desert carries the last they'll see of sand for quite a while. Dean drifts, his mind empty and light. At some point, Sam's hand creeps into his, warm and trusting, and Dean holds on as tight as he can.

He dreams: the hum of the open road beneath his wheels, the wind a constant stream against his ears. A cup of coffee the size of a pitcher rides between his thighs.

The man is beside him, his head canted toward the window, his face hidden in the rushing dark. The light casts a white reflection against the glass, a wide mouth and a strong jaw, eyes closed in sleep. Long hair, blunt cut and in need of washing, curls limp against his collar. Dean wants to reach him, reach out, but his hand is curled loosely around the wheel, and he needs to keep his eyes on the road. Want coils in his stomach, deep and true. He wants to touch, and hold; and he wants to do more than that, too.

"Who are you?" he says, but his voice comes out strange, lost and quiet. "Please. Just tell me who you are."

The road spins beneath his wheels, the night comes on. The man in the car beside him doesn't answer.

~

It's hard to wake Sam in the morning.

At first Dean thinks it must be the unaccustomed comfort -- grass beneath their backs instead of rock or dirt. But Sam's eyes don't look right, when he finally opens them. And his face is warm under Dean's hand.

"I need to look at it," Dean tells him, and it's a measure of how wrong things are that Sam just shakes his head.

He doesn't really protest when Dean pulls his sleeve up. Red, vicious, angry, the wound is swollen and taut. At the center, where the white thread had lodged, a yellowed knot of pus shows through the skin. Inside it, too deep to be clearly seen, something shifts and writhes, pressing toward the light. Dean's gut churns at the sight of it.

"Don't touch it," Sam begs, but Dean _has_ to; he has to know how bad it is. Has to lance it if he can, draw that sickness out. Sam's face pales when he sees the knife, and he tries to jerk away, but Dean holds him still. Holds him close.

"Sam, you know I have to."

Tightly, teeth clenched under the terrified twist of his mouth, Sam nods. "You'll have to...to hold me down," Sam whispers. "I don't think I can--"

"It's okay. I'm sorry, buddy. I don't want to hurt you."

"I know."

"Don't hate me, okay?"

"Just do it already!"

Dean nods. There's nothing to give Sam, nothing to help. Nothing to make this better. He bites his lip, says a prayer to nobody he believes in, and cradles Sam against his chest.

He's prepared for Sam to fight when the tip of the knife sinks in. He's prepared to hold on and do what has to be done. But Dean's not ready for Sam to scream at the barest touch of the blade to his skin; he's not prepared for the seizure that rips through Sam's narrow, wiry frame. The way Sam's eyes roll back in his head, the way his limbs jerk and spasm.

For a second he hesitates, pulls the knife away, holds back, and in that second Sam's eyes come clear and bright. His hand closes around Dean's wrist with ferocious strength. "Finish," he says, "please, just finish it, get it out of me. Get it out."

"I'll try."

"Please."

Dean wipes sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist, wipes at the water standing in his eyes. This thing, this ugly thing inside Sam, it's his fault. It's his monster. It called to him out of the desert, and he answered. _Choose,_ it told him with its dying breath, and he can't. It's too fast, too much. He's not ready. The man in the world away is a man. Sam, fevered and broken and infected in his arms, is just a boy.

Dean raises the knife. He brings it down. Sam starts to scream again, and then keeps screaming. Dean cuts into him, and the lightning breaks across Sam's skin, across the blade. Dean cuts and cuts. Long, white, spindly threads boil from the wound, pink with the stain of Sam's blood, and reach blindly to wrap around the knife. Smoke boils off the iron, sickly cloying and bitter in the early morning air, and Sam, crazy strong and brave, smart and sweet and stupid in the worst of ways, Sam passes out somewhere in the middle, voice dying out on a choked gasp as his body falls limp and boneless in Dean's arms.

Grimly, wrist-deep in blood, Dean saws at Sam's shoulder in peace until the last of it is gone.

~

He spends the last of their water washing out the wound. He tears a strip from the bottom of his shirt and wraps it around Sam's shoulder. He waits for hours as the sun climbs to the top of the sky, but Sam never wakes.

~

He walks, Sam's body draped over his shoulder like an empty sack. The grass climbs higher and greener, and his only hope is that somewhere on the track up ahead he'll finally cross water. Water to ease his thirst, water to truly clean the burning gash on Sam's shoulder. Water to turn them both human again, fill out their sagging skins and push the healing blood through their bodies. He walks, his eyes dry and hot in their sockets, fear for Sam a pulsing roil in his stomach, and he walks, and by nightfall there's still nothing. Just the track, and the empty sky, and the dying boy.

He curls his body around Sam's in the dark and tries to sleep, but the thirst has its hooks in him, and Sam is hot and restless. He cries out, twitching with fever dreams Dean can't drive back. There's a moment of stillness, deep in the small hours of the night, that squeezes Dean's heart in a cold fist, and he thinks, _he's gone, Sam's gone, I've lost him,_ but Sam isn't gone.

He's gone quiet, awake. His eyes are still bright with heat. Dean may have ripped the demon from him, but he left something worse behind, and in this easy moment of slow, labored breathing, Dean reads Sam's death.

"I heard you," Sam tells him. His voice is reedy and thin, barely any breath in it. "Every night, I heard you dreaming. That man."

"You shouldn't try to talk," Dean says. "You save your strength."

" _Who are you, don't go, help me._ " Sam's mouth twists bitterly. "I heard you."

"Sam."

"I heard what that demon told you. That's how I knew to come. I heard what it said. You have to choose."

Dean swallows, his throat raw and dry.

"You said you wouldn't leave me, but you will. You could choose me," Sam says, soft and desperate, and his body starts to shake in Dean's arms, no matter how tight Dean holds him. "You could choose me, but you won't."

"I will." Dean gathers Sam in tighter, tucks all his long limbs in and rocks him. He presses his mouth to the side of Sam's head, kisses his dusty hair. "You hold on, Sam, you hear me? You hold on, and I promise you, I will."

~

The next day and the next, Sam holds on. There is no water. But at the end of the second day, there is a town.

Dean sees it in the distance like a faint mirage, and waits for it to vanish. But it lingers, and he reaches its gates, which are locked against the darkness, and he knocks until his fingers are bloody, until the gates swing open and someone lets them in.

Cool hands pull at him, pull Sam from his back, pull them apart no matter how hard Dean tries to hang on. Someone wipes at his face with a damp cloth; someone else pours water across his dry, cracked lips. He tells them, "Sam, please, help Sam," and someone hushes him, and the empty dark well at the bottom of his mind drags him down.

Hours pass. Maybe days. Dean reaches for Sam over and over, and Sam is never there. He calls for him, and Sam doesn't come. But the man comes. The man in the world away.

He takes Dean's reaching hands, gathers them between his. His fingers are strong and callused, his skin cool. He sits beside Dean in the dark, brushes Dean's hair back from his eyes. It's a touch as gentle as any Dean has ever known, and it breaks something open deep inside him, something ugly and black, something cold. Dean's fingers curl desperately, holding on; he opens his mouth, and darkness boils out of his throat like a river.

"I'm sorry," the man says, over and over and over. "I'm so sorry. But you have to come back. I need you here. Dean," he says, "Dean, please, I need you to come back."

 _Who are you?_ Dean wants to ask. _Who_ are _you?_

But he doesn't ask, and the man doesn't answer. And it doesn't matter, because morning comes and Dean wakes up in sunlight, wakes up with water in his belly and strength in his bones.

And he already knows.

~

In the town, in its center, there's a square, and in the center of the square there's a cage built of iron and wood. Inside the cage there's a burnt man, naked but for a scrap of cloth around his middle. His eyes are black, empty holes, and he sobs brokenly, sometimes loud, sometimes soft. Sometimes someone comes to bring him water, and he curses them, but he always drinks.

"A long time ago," the woman tells him, the one who opened the gate, the one who let him in. "A man came through the north gate. He had some magic about him, something different. Folks could just tell. He said he could bring a person back to themselves, put back everything this godforsaken world erased. Melucca, there, he was new. He didn't know any better."

"It didn't work?" Dean says, staring at the wreck of what once was a man. "It did this, instead."

"No, it worked." The woman looks into Dean's eyes, looks deep. "Think on that."

Melucca is the only man in the village who knows his name, though he's long past answering to it. Somehow the women seem to hold on longer, but even so, precious few have a past. "We tossed him into the starlight, that man," she tells Dean. "We don't let anybody in the north gate these days. You're lucky, you came in off the Beam. Otherwise you'd still be outside, waiting."

"The Beam?"

"You know it. You'd be dead if you didn't. The safe path. There used to be more, but that time's passed. This is the only one left."

"Please," Dean says, laying a hand on her wrist. "Please, can you tell me where Sam is?"

"He's being tended to."

"He needs me. I promised I'd look after him."

"He's being tended to," the woman says, and leaves him alone in the square. Melucca, the last named man, sobs brokenly beside him.

Dean searches, from house to house. There aren't many people here at the end of the world. The ones left are ghosts of themselves, the skin that's left after all that made it matter wears away. He finds Sam in a clutch of almost-people, washed and clothed in clean cast-offs, a clean bandage wrapped around his shoulder. Sam is alive, his chest moving up and down in an even rhythm. Sam is awake.

Dean pushes through the crowd, pushes them aside, and kneels on the floor beside Sam's pallet. Memory washes over him, a tide out of the past that rises and rises until he's ready to choke on it, until he understands completely why Melucca cries. He kneels beside Sam, touches his wrist, his hair. He cups Sam's face in his broad, brown hand and says, "I'm sorry."

Sam turns his face away.

"There's nothing we can do," someone says. "It's been inside him too long."

Dean nods; he knows.

"You have to go."

Dean knows that, too. He nods again, and they leave, one by one, drifting away like smoke.

"I have to go," Dean says. A part of him is already gone. He can't stay here, can't do what needs to be done if he stays here. He gathers Sam's hands between his own and holds on. They're burning hot, the fire beneath the skin already long out of control.

"I knew you would," Sam says to the wall. "I always knew."

"I'm sorry," he says, "I'm so, so sorry, Sam."

Sam turns back to Dean. His eyes blaze with fury, fever-bright. "You said you'd take care of me," Sam hisses. "You said you would choose _me_ , and you're going to him instead. You're a liar," he says, "you're a, a fucking liar," and his voice breaks, his face crumples in on itself. Tears come, fast and hot, and Dean tries to brush them away but Sam flails at him with feeble hands, pushing him off.

"I don't want you anymore," Sam says, his breath hitching in his throat. "I don't want you. Just go."

"Sam."

"Just _go!_ "

Dean stands up. He goes to the door, reaches for the knob. And then he stops. For a long, silent moment he stops, and Sam is quiet, too, and for that one long moment they're together, that one last moment.

"I have to," Dean whispers finally. "I promised I wouldn't leave you, Sammy, so... I have to. You understand?"

Sam is already gone. All that matters of him. "Who are you?" the dying boy asks, his voice whisper-thin and curious. "Who am I?"

"I'm your brother," Dean tells him, tears spilling down his cheeks. "And your name is Sam."

~

The gates close behind him, and Dean is back on the track. Back on the Beam. Behind him, the world wastes away, and in it a boy who once loved him lies alone in an empty room. Dean has left his water skins behind, has left his gun and his knife and his heart, has left everything to be eaten by the vast white desert and time.

The grass along the beam is lush and bright, and the smell of sweet cool water is in the air. By noon, he begins to see mountains, far off against the bottom of the sky. And before the mountains, rising up out of the ground like an army, he sees rank after rank of trees. The ground beneath his feet begins to rise, a gentle slope edging into low foothills. Dean walks, and walks, and walks. When he looks behind him, the world is an empty valley, white as an empty page.

The Beam fetches up against a bare wall of rock, and in the wall there is a cavern leading deep into the earth. He walks until he's forced to crawl, crawls until he has to dig. His nails break, his fingers break, and still he claws his way through the rock and the dirt, through the ground, through the wall between himself and the world. Behind him, there may once have been a boy, but somewhere ahead, somewhere below, there is a man.

Dean digs down, and down, and down, until his hand breaks through into clear air and sunlight, grass and wet earth between his fingers, now whole and strong. He pulls himself up, up out of the ground, tilts his head back and takes in a deep, choking breath.

Hands find him, wrap around his arms; they pull, and the earth lets him go. He opens his eyes, blinks away the dirt and the glare, and looks up.

"I told you I knew who you were," the man says, tears smearing dirt across his face. He pulls Dean up, wraps strong arms around him, holds on. "I told you," he says, and for a second he's just a boy, a freakishly tall, wide-shouldered boy, fear and hope and pain in his eyes.

"I told you I wouldn't leave you," Dean says, and his arms go around his brother, tight as a vice. He breathes the air of the world he'd lost, the one Hell took from him, and it's clear and clean and good. "I promised."

~

 **  
Epilogue   
**

Sam builds a fire between the hole in the earth and the car, and drags Dean over to it. He can't take his hands off Dean's face, can't stop reaching for Dean even though he's got him, right there. Dean came out of the ground dirt-streaked and whole, and Sam can't hold it together, not like he wants to, not like he should. He finds Dean's mouth, opens it up with Dean's startled but game approval; he kisses Dean like he's drowning, like he _wants_ to drown. Dean has been gone a month, a year, a lifetime -- Sam's always had him, has always lost him, but this moment, this place on this ground, right here, _this_ is always. This is something he can keep.

"I brought cheeseburgers," Sam says when he can talk again, when he's willing to let Dean talk. "And beer. And a fast car."

Dean stares at the car. Then, for a minute, he stares at Sam. "You got me out," he says, wonder in his voice. "You did that?"

"Dean." He gives his brother a shake. "Dude. I carved a door into the world for you."

"You made me want to come through it." Dean curls a hand around the back of Sam's neck and squeezes, hard, his eyes bright. "Best rescue _ever,_ " he says, and then he lets his head fall back against the ground and laughs.

"Damn right," Sam says, grinning, his heart giving a crazy, uneven thump in his chest. "Because I'm a freakin' badass."

"You get that from me," Dean tells him seriously. "Now, where's the beef?"

Sam pushes food and drink into Dean until he collapses in a sodden pile of well-fed arms and legs, fast asleep. Even then, Dean won't let go of him, and Sam doesn't want him to. Somewhere inside, Sam still holds the quiet loneliness of an alien city, the dark and empty silence of the room he died in. He wouldn't let Dean let go if he tried.

Dean looks like _himself_ , that's the hardest thing to get over. He doesn't look like the hunter in the desert, doesn't look like the man who walked away down the Beam to find him. He looks like Dean, solid and hollow-eyed, alive in a way most people never are. Sam wants to do something for Dean's feet, but they're brand new feet, they look better off than Sam's do. He rubs at bandage on his shoulder, where the angel drew the dark, alien blood that made the door. It aches, and it stings a little, but he thinks it will heal. He wraps himself around his brother and looks up and up, at the high, distant, icy stars that pour down nothing but light, and after a little while, he sleeps.

"It will heal," the angel says. He stands above them, the shadows of his wings spread wide against the sky. Peace sinks into Sam, lighting the dark places. The angel kneels, lays a hand on his shoulder. It burns, white-hot, a searing pain that purifies as it passes.

"Will he?"

The angel's ice-blue eyes soften. He looks from Sam to Dean, his gaze warm and sober.

"Please," Sam says, "We did it, right? He's safe now. He'll be all right?"

"There's work ahead. He'll have to be. The angel stands up, dusts off his hands, and smiles. "You both will."

 

 

.end

  


  


Art by **[_afterism](http://users.livejournal.com/_afterism/233747.html)**.

 

~

Feedback is always welcome!

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings: _Horror, violence. One scene of fairly soft-focus, sexualized noncon horror - not between Sam and Dean. For those who might be concerned, the adult warning is for violence only; the slash is g-rated, and not underage._
> 
> Notes: Many, many deep thanks to my awesome artist, _afterism. I love her piece, and the way it captures the solitude and emptiness of the world I was trying to express. Please take a minute to stop by and visit her post to let her know how terrific she is. :)
> 
> Also, many thanks to my kind and patient betas, laurificus and Dorinda, who poked and prodded and de-typoed to the best of their ability before I changed even more things and ran off without asking. :) Any mistakes left are, therefore, completely mine.
> 
> And finally, a giant thank you to the samdean_otp mods, for being understanding in the face of RL delays and for running such an amazing challenge!


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